Sousei no Aquarion – 19

Short Summary:
During an assault on a glowing tower, Apollo, Sylvia, and Reika find themselves transported into a bizarro dream world. Sirius also lands in it after a failed teleport change. They meet a young child, who resembles someone Apollo once knew, that asks who they are. Apollo responds, then turns around to find that he is alone. Many wierd things proceed to happen to him, including a talk with various DEAVA members about Seria and Apollonius and the dream world that he is in. Somewhere else in the city, Silvia is approached by a cloaked figure who turns out to be her brother. They eventually find Reika and decide to head for their original objective, the glowing tower. Apollo has the same idea, arriving there and climbing the steps. He is confronted by the child who again asks who he is. Reika, Sirius, and Silvia form Aquarion Mars and try to attack the tower, but are blocked by a shadow angel. Toma appears and challenges Sirius’ humanity, while the red feathers reappear on his bracelet. While Sirius fights to affirm who he is, Apollo is confronted by the fact that he couldn’t save Baron. Apollo eventually disbelieves the child away as not the person he once knew. With that, the entire illusion is broken and our heroes return to the real world. They then destroy the shadow angel and dice the tower.

Welcome to Bizarro Aquarion. Today’s episode is done in an entirely different style than normal. Even the “real world” scenes look way off from normal, probably because of a different animation team. The dream world, though, makes today’s Aquarion look like a completely different series. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just didn’t feel very, well, Aquarion. That being said, I do like the fact that the past few episodes have broken the monotonous monster of the week format we had for so long.
Anyway, the episode itself was good. Apollo finally learns the story of Apollonius and Seria, and we get to see him later with wings. And even if the rest of the episode looked wierd, at least the mecha fight scenes are still normal and animated quite well. However, they did use Go Tight! this episode as the insert song which I feel is a bit too soon.
The ending sequence is back to normal, and next week’s episode’s animation seems to be normal. Hopefully they can start moving towards the final arc.

In case you’re interested, it’s because the guy who’s behind this episode is a Mr. Satoru Utsunomiya who is famous for doing animation like that – looks bizarre, but is quite interesting and can be realistic…

A famous episode done by him is Paranoia Agent ep 3… If there was a different animation director changing the faces in this episode you’d get something like the animation in ep 2 where Apollo is trying to break out of his chains and is kicked around by Gen. That was done by him as well.

Interesting to know. I looked up the credits for the episode beforehand, but didn’t really recognize any of the works of either Takahashi-san or Utsunomiya-san, who are the listed animation directors for this ep.

Satoru Utsunomiya is indeed a special person in the animation industry… You might want to go look at ttp://www.pelleas.net/aniTOP and search for Utsunomiya… the guy there, a real animation critic, has a lot of praise for Satoru Utsunomiya.

He also did part of the animation in the first OP (I believe when Apollo tried to hit Gen) and has also participated in Macross Zero…

Could I request something though? I’d like it if you could send me screenshots of the key animators for this episode (in the credits they’re credited under 原画, it’s usually right after the seiyuu credits. Sometimes it goes for more than one page)